It begins ---
Maybe when she's dressing, her fingers tucked
under the wire of her bra.

Or idly in the bath
their familiar weight
made light of,

or in the mirror, one arm ballerinaed high,
the other testing the water
of her own flesh.

A mote under the skin
settling in her breast,
soft but hard as cartilage, and busy with its own beginning.

*

He tells her kindly enough, and anyway
she knows what's coming, or rather what's already there,

by the way he offers the seat,
his practised look of concern and the slow pace of his voice

that keeps the end of what he has to say
always at arms length.
She hears the words he uses
and is quietly surprised by how language can do this:

how a certain order can carry so much chaos,
and how that word, with its hard C of cruelty

and soft c of uncertainty,
seems so fitted to the task.

But then she has to leave the surgery
and walk into her new world, so startlingly the same:

the dustbins flowering with rubbish,
shoes for sale at the side of the street and the buses

redding past as if nothing has happened.

*

November 5th and her first outing since,
pale in the Autumn air, the night behind her,
tic-tac sparks from the fire streaming away on the wind.

All of us masked in the flame's hot soul,
writing with sparklers,
our names trailing their furious heads.
Her youngest gives her a bottle of champagne,
one that he's saved for this,
her coming back to us.

It is a single-serving, his size.
She wrings its neck gently, easing it open
but allows him the final give,

the pop and smoky release of its cork,
which he keeps , holding it tight in his fist.
She watches his fingers work round it,

under his coat's pocket, as he feels its shape:
soft but hard, stubborn to the touch, just like the bump
in the middle of the night that started all this in the first place.

*

She's all the way back now,
her life fitting about her once more
like old clothes pulled on from the changing room floor.

But her mind is still faceted, cut from the brink
her body brought it to,
and with it, she dreams.
Sometimes of the weight of its going,
the invisible twin she rises to touch
only to find skin over bone.

Or sometimes of how it was before,
holding sun-curled photos of the past.
But mostly of a day in the future.

when she will choose the nudist night to visit the pool,
where she will walk slow and slim
all the way to the deep end and enter the water an Amazon,

able to draw her bow further and deeper than other women.